White Supremacists Launch Tax Strike Against Louisiana Government

A couple of days
ago, I posted links to two short articles about a tax resistance
campaign in Reconstruction-era Louisiana. I remember doing a little research
on this campaign when I was assembling
We Won’t Pay!:
A Tax Resistance Reader, but I also remember that the trail gave
out after a while and I didn’t find anything particularly promising.

Today I tried to pick up the trail again. Here’s what I found.

To set the scene: Louisiana in 1872 is a little
something like Iraq in 2006. It’s been sacked by
the enemy, which dissolved the local government and military (which then
started to assemble into ethnic militia terrorist groups), and installed its
own idea of a democratically-elected government — one that seems largely to be
composed of outsiders and members of the formerly-marginalized ethnic group.
There’s rampant corruption, and the invading army has to swoop back in from
time to time to provide muscle to back up the weak central government’s
dictates.

There’s an election. The governor, a former Union Army colonel and Republican
carpetbagger named Henry C. Warmoth, allies himself with the Democratic
challenger, a former Confederate Army colonel named John McEnery. He says the
election’s in the bag because, after all, he’s the governor and he can fix it.
(Why did this strange alliance take place? Two possible explanations. One,
that Warmoth said he’d support McEnery if McEnery would then appoint him to be
U.S. Senator. Two,
that Warmoth was an ally of the more conservative Horace Greeley “Liberal
Republican” faction of the Republican Party and the Republican candidate for
governor was an ally of the Ulysses S. Grant “Radical Republican” wing.)

Anyway, so there’s an orgy of ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, and so
forth, and at the end of it, whaddya know: McEnery’s “fusion ticket” loses.
The “Returning Board” that is set up to certify the election results declares
the Republican candidate, William P. Kellogg (another carpetbagger, originally
from Vermont) the winner.

Warmoth dismisses the Returning Board and appoints another one. They come up
with the answer he likes. For good measure, he appoints a third
Returning Board and they too say McEnery is the real winner. The legislature,
meanwhile, successfully impeaches Warmoth for all of this chicanery.
(Thereupon the lieutenant governor took over for the remaining 34 days before
Kellogg’s inauguration, becoming the first black governor in
U.S. history.) The
State Supreme Court eventually takes up the case and rules that the first
Returning Board had every right to make its decision and the decision of the
other two boards can be disregarded. Things don’t stop there, though.
Eventually the U.S.
Congress has to debate the whole thing, but they never quite get the gumption
up to take a stand either way, which leaves everything up to President
U.S. Grant, who,
naturally, sees little reason to interfere with the governorship of his
Republican ally.

But the McEnery crew aren’t quite ready to quit. They set up a parallel
government — holding their own inauguration, raising their own militia,
seating their own legislature, and insisting that the Kellogg crew are
“usurpers” and not the legitimate government at all. As part of this, they
insist that no demands for taxes coming from Kellogg’s government are
legitimate. On February
14th, 1873, McEnery issued
this proclamation:

Whereas, Information has reached me that certain persons, pretending
to be tax-collectors in the City of New-Orleans and in parishes of the State,
but having no legal authority therefor, are issuing circulars and notices to
taxpayers to come forward within a certain time to pay their taxes and
licenses, threatening certain penalties prescribed by law against all parties
failing to comply with such notice,

Now, I, John McEnery, Governor of the State of Louisiana, do issue this my
proclamation, warning all tax and license payers not to obey or regard such
notice or demand, but to refuse and resist the same, and recognize as the
only lawful persons charged with the collection and enforcement of taxes
those who hold over as tax-collectors under the Government of the State as
existing on the 4th of
November, 1872, and those who have been appointed and commissioned by
the undersigned. Full protection will be guaranteed by the Government to all
citizens of the State against any penalties or violences which may be
attempted by persons who may seek to enforce their illegal demands and acts
and to exercise their usurped power and authority in the premises.

Black voters were essential to the Republican victory. The Republican/Democrat
split in Louisiana politics was a black/white split, if you subtract out the
white carpetbagger Republicans. And the McEnery faction resented the power of
black voters. Its war on the Kellogg government and on Republican
office-holders was in part a race war, and there was at least one
ethnic-cleansing episode:
The Colfax Massacre.

(The McEnery and Kellogg governments each appointed their own set of local
officials in Grant Parish. When a white militia organized to try to take over
the government buildings in Colfax, and started terrorizing black people in
the parish, the blacks gathered in Colfax, hoping for safety in numbers.
Dozens were butchered, some executed after having been taken prisoner.)

Former Confederate military officers formed a militia designed to defend towns
under McEnery-faction control, and even successfully raided New Orleans itself
at one point — putting Kellogg’s own forces on the run. But McEnery’s militia
folded when the federal government sent its own forces in to prop Kellogg up.

By May, McEnery gave up his pretense of being governor. The Kellogg
administration lasted until 1877. McEnery’s
militia became the White League, and continued to rely on terrorist tactics to
intimidate black voters and assassinate Republican office-holders. Over time,
the federal government wearied of having to keep interfering. President Grant’s
Attorney General noted that “The whole public are tired out with autumnal
outbreaks in the South, and the great majority are now ready to condemn any
interference on the part of the government.”

The Supreme Court ruled that the federal government was powerless to prosecute
members of terrorist mobs like the one that perpetrated the Colfax Massacre,
and Louisiana itself never managed to bring anyone to justice for it. The
White League eventually was successful in its terrorist campaign to bring an
end to Republican rule.

In the presidential election of 1876,
Louisiana sent two sets of electors — one Republican set that Kellogg said
represented the parishes in Louisiana where the White League hadn’t
intimidated black voters, and one Democratic set that Louisiana whites
insisted represented the real Louisiana electorate. The election was close
enough that it made a big difference. Bush/Gore’s got nothing on this one.
Samuel Tilden had more popular votes and more electoral votes — unless all the disputed electoral votes went Rutherford Hayes’s way. As part
of a compromise, Hayes took the crown but said in return that he’d stop
propping up Republican governments in the Confederate states and would end the
occupation. In 1877, the Democrats took over in
Louisiana, Kellogg (as part of the compromise) took a seat in the
U.S. Senate, the
White League was absorbed into the state militia, and the political power (and
civil rights) of black people was pretty much wiped out — in
1910 there were a total of 730 black people
registered to vote in the whole state.

The tax resistance aspect to this story appears to be little more than a
footnote. If you believe the brags of the Kellogg government, it had reduced
corruption and increased efficiency in tax collection to the extent that even
during the tax resistance campaign and the various armed struggles it was
bringing in more revenue than the previous administration had the year before.
But in any case, the tax resistance was not so much a tactic as a logical
outgrowth of the argument that the Kellogg government was not legitimate.

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